The Worst Poet Ever

A collection of poems penned by a late 19th Century Scotsman named William Topaz McGonagall drew considerable attention when they went up for auction in Edinburgh last Friday. Was this man the Robert Burns of his generation? Quite the opposite. McGonagall's poetry is celebrated in the U.K. for being astonishingly bad. Buyers were bidding on a literary Edsel.

Just how bad was McGonagall? Here are some reviews:

Scotland on Sunday noted his "tortuous rhyme and flagrant disregard for metre."

Nicholas Parsons, in The Joy of Bad Verse, points out that: "Few people have acquired a niche in history by producing what nobody applauded."

Stephen Pile, in his Book of Heroic Failures, raves: "He was so giftedly bad that he backed unwittingly into genius."

The poet Hugh MacDiarmid has offered a more erudite perspective, claiming McGonagall "was not a bad poet; still less a good bad poet. He was not a poet at all, and that he has become synonymous with bad poetry in Scotland is only a natural consequence of Scottish insensitivity to the qualities alike of good poetry and bad."

You only need to read McGonagall's best-known work "The Tay Bridge Disaster," to understand the disaster that was William McGonagall's poetry. He wrote the solemn verse to memorialize a bridge collapse that killed 75 people. Here's a taste of it:



So the train mov'd slowly along the Bridge of Tay,


Until it was about midway,

Then the central girders with a crash gave way,

And down went the train and passengers into the Tay.

Rhyming can be difficult sometimes (even John Keats admitted having to occasionally settle on a rhyme), but in these lines, McGonagall only had to think up three words that rhymed with "Tay"--we're not talking orange here--and he came up with one...which he repeated...and then he just wrote "Tay" again. He thinks of some more towards the end of the poem:

I must now conclude my lay
By telling the world fearlessly without the least dismay,
That your central girders would not have given way,
At least many sensible men do say,
Had they been supported on each side with buttresses,
At least many sensible men confesses,
For the stronger we our houses do build,
The less chance we have of being killed.

Typical of McGonagall's verse, "The Tay Bridge Disaster" doesn't have a meter to speak of--it has more of a drunken ramble. You could call it accentual verse, with a three beat first line, then seven, then five...You know what? Let's just walk away.

Claims that McGonagall was a satirist, a clever pretender to literary wretchedness, have been debunked. This excerpt from his autobiography confirms he believed himself a poet.

"...Dame Fortune has been very kind to me by endowing me with the genius of poetry. I remember how I felt when I received the spirit of poetry. It was in the year of 1877, and in the month of June, when the flowers were in full bloom. Well, it being the holiday week in Dundee, I was sitting in my back room in Paton's Lane, Dundee, lamenting to myself because I couldn't get to the Highlands on holiday to see the beautiful scenery, when all of a sudden my body got inflamed, and instantly I was seized with a strong desire to write poetry, so strong, in fact, that in imagination I thought I heard a voice crying in my ears--"Write! Write!"

It's a wonder that he never heard the voices crying "Stop! Stop!"

McGonagall never stopped, once hiking 60 miles through a storm to ask Queen Victoria if he could be Poet Laureate. While he wasn't granted an audience, he did write a poem about his visit (the double meaning in the last line undoubtedly escaped him):




"Oh! it was a most gorgeous sight to be seen,
Numerous foreign magnates were there for to see the Queen;
And to the vast multitude there of women and men,
Her Majesty for two hours showed herself to them."

It's hard not to smile at that. And there is something unwittingly brilliant about McGonagall's poetry. The poems at auction last week sold for a remarkable 6,600 pounds (about $13,000). So if that guy at your local coffee shop with the bad facial hair and bongos is selling something that passes for a book, you might want to pick up copy.

 

Comments

[mamacat]

I have always, and I do mean always, assumed that the worst poet in the world was myself. Thank you for giving me hope, that maybe someone else is more worthy of that title than moi. (Could I claim the title of worst living poet?)

[Pippilin]

Thank you for a very funny piece. Could you do a prose follow-up on Bulwer-Lytton?

[ramal]

There once was a young lady from Fenwick...

[Roamoff]

Almost all “poetry” over the last dozen or more decades is NOT REALLY POETRY. Poetry lost meter and rhyme when idiots began eliciting “feelings” from people and labeling it as “poetry” no matter what garbage came out (like in group therapy to overcome childhood traumas). I heard the “poetry” from a nationwide winner of poetry slams and it was outright pure crap - not one iota of meter or rhyme anywhere. Even so-called “great” poets like Emily D. have a complete lack of rhyme (though she often has meter). Writings like hers should be called “prose”, not poetry. I have been writing real poetry, both rhyme and meter, for years. All English teachers reject it because their pure crap stream of consciousness is so easy to do and cannot be critiqued. Much of my stuff has alliteration, magic, and emotion without breaking meter and rhyme. I challenge people to write good poetry with rhyme and meter and still have emotion in it. I tried to publish my real poetry and got rejected so I created my own web site to publish real poetry. NO ONE ANYWHERE HAS EVER CONTRIBUTED. That is because there is no poetry being written anywhere (except by me?). I challenge anybody anywhere to find any better poetry than mine that has rhyme and meter plus other elements of good prose. www.JustPlainPoetry.com.

[normathumb]

P.S. Your link doesn't work.

[Roamoff]

Bad luck reins. The host to my site went down for a couple of days and just came bck up Please tr again. www.JustPlainPoetry.com .

[Roamoff]

Bad luck reins. The host to my web site was down for a couple of days and finally came back up. Please try again.

www.JustPlainPoetry.com

(my prior attempt had typos, sorry)

[Roamoff]

HuffingtonPost adds their site to the front of links. Right click on the link. Select “Copy Shortcut”. Go to your browser and select the entire address that is there and replace it (“Paste”) with the new link. Then edit it and remove all of it except the last part www.JustPlainPoetry.comcom” before hitting enter. Or simply type www.JustPlainPoetry.comcom” without the quotes into your browser.

[RedWhiteandBrooklyn]

There's an interesting article in last week's The New Yorker about animals that have been trained to "talk". I laughed out loud at the comparison made of a gorilla's "Cat. Soft. Nice. Nice." with the poems of Gertrude Stein.

[tjmurphy]

In the highlands of Scotland ,

Just off the North Sea,

On the banks of the Tay

Lies the City Dundee.

[RedWhiteandBrooklyn]

'Tis there that the Scots lads
In kilt and in tam,
Nip into their local,
To enjoy a wee dram.

[tjmurphy]

The Pipes, the drones,
The chanter they hear,
As the lads lift their glasses
To wish all, GOOD CHEER.

[BobSF94117]

I think the bit from his autobiography confirms he was just joking.

[Dingoangst]

Come on, all poetry is bad unless it's written by Poe or Ismael Reed. So it's just a matter of being bad or really bad. Of course, this guy's really, really bad.

[normathumb]

You left out Roamoff.

[Fernando]

When it comes to poetry literary criticism, critics can be so unbelievably haughty and aloof that most ordinary folks their word for it and just follow along. I'm willing to bet my sparest change that had some people in the ivory tower decided to make McGonagall "cool" people would be singing his praises.

It reminds me of how William Faulkner had been out of print in the US for years until the French existentialists began reading him in the 1940s. Suddenly, Faulkner was a "must read" because Sartre and Camus thought he was cool. Faulkner hasn't been out of print since!

[Trueheart]

Is the man in full Scots battle regalia in the photograph which accompanies this piece actually the Great McGonagall?

[Trueheart]

I loved his description of the moment when Clio, Muse of Poetry, endowed him with the gift. It was in June, when all the flowers were in bloom.....­.but where was poor Bard McGonagall? " I was sitting in my back room in Paton's Lane, Dundee, lamenting to myself because I couldn't get to the Highlands on holiday to see the beautiful scenery." Oh, irony, irony, thy name is McGonagall.

[whereswaldoandobl]

Hmmm

I heard it was a dark and stormy night,
When McGonagall first felt the urge to write.

[LiarLiarIraqsOnFire]

George Bush thinks he's a genius!!!

[evalpor]

I quote Alduous Huxley, commenting on the work of a French clergymen writing in the early 1600's -

"He loved the Muse but alas, the Muse did not love him."

[callanish]

At least he gave it a shot. It's better to try and fail than not try at all.

[bracken]

Googled phrases like "some poems I wrote" or 'poetry samples' will bring up much the same.

[UnionJok]

Monty Python immortalized another Scot, revered today for his IOU's, rather than his poetry. Most were along the lines of, "Can ya lend me half a crown till Tuesday?" The most valuable was, "Can you lend me a quid?"

[Elmo]

that was ewan macteagle.